The Writing Revolution

by Amalia E Gnanadesikan

  Han’gl also recognizes that phonemes are grouped together into syllables and morphemes. Speech as we hear it is naturally divided into syllables; it is also easy to realize that complex words are composed of meaningful parts (morphemes). But the meaningless and often unpronounceable phoneme is a concept that children learning linear alphabets must struggle with. By contrast, han’gl is generally taught to children as a pseudosyllabary, being presented first in simple syllables rather than as independent letters. As a result, Korean children can read before they begin their formal education.

  The only serious drawback to han’gl has been its incompatibility with the typewriter. This Western innovation assumed a linear alphabet, and the non-linear alphabets of Korea and southern Asia – though no harder to read, write, or learn – have sometimes been considered inferior because they are so hard to type (a conclusion no doubt supported by a good measure of ethnocentrism). Fortunately, the word-processing programs of the digital age have largely done away with this objection. The user can type in the letters one after another, and the computer will arrange them into appropriate syllable blocks (similarly, the computer will correctly create Indic akaras, or choose the word-initial, -medial, or -final version of a letter in Arabic).

  Although later historians have tended to assume that Sejong could not have succeeded in designing such a marvelous script without the assistance of his academy, the records of the time are unequivocal in calling the Korean alphabet the king’s personal creation, in contrast with other inventions of the period, for which the credit is more evenly divided. He announced his creation in the last month of the lunar year 1443 – somewhere around January 1, 1444, in our solar calendar.

  Fierce objections to Sejong’s work surfaced almost immediately, led by Ch’oe Mal-li, vice-director of Sejong’s own academy. Why was the king endangering good relations with China by so visibly deviating from Chinese practices? Why would the king of a self-respecting country want to imitate barbarians such as the Mongols, the Jurchin, and the Japanese? Only barbarians used scripts other than Chinese characters. Furthermore, by lowering standards of literacy, the new alphabet would lead to rampant cultural illiteracy as people would neglect the study of Classical Chinese and of high culture. Surely the king didn’t want that?! The king’s hope that a vernacular script would help prevent miscarriages of justice was misplaced, as witness China, where the language matched the writing system but injustice was not unknown. The king was behaving with great imprudence on a matter with potentially profound consequences without having consulted any of his ministers. Was the king further going to endanger his health and the welfare of the nation by continuing to work on his alphabet project on the upcoming retreat he was taking for his health, during which all inessential work was to be handed over to his ministers? And would he meanwhile waste the crown prince’s time on it too?

  The king may indeed have wished to distance his country from China, and he must have realized that his plan to educate the masses was a threat to the social order treasured by Ch’oe Mal-li and his fellow literati; but he was wise enough not to say so. Instead he issued a sharp rejoinder presenting the new script as a boon to the Korean people – which he as king had every moral right to convey – and emphasizing its application for correcting and standardizing the pronunciation of Chinese characters – a scholarly project for which he was uniquely qualified. The crown prince, he added, would do very well to concern himself with a matter of such great national importance.

  Having thus quashed the most vocal criticism, Sejong next put his new script through a rigorous trial run. He set the more alphabet-friendly scholars of his academy to compiling the Yongbi ch’ n ka, or “Songs of Flying Dragons,” a work of history and poetry praising Sejong’s grandfather and founder of the Chosn dynasty, Yi Snggye.

  Confident that his new script was working as intended, on October 9, 1446, Sejong finally made public his Hunmin chng’ m, “The Correct Sounds for the Instruction of the People,” the name by which he titled both his script and the short promulgation document he wrote explaining it. In the Hunmin chng’ m, each symbol is presented with an example of a Chinese character containing that sound. In its short but moving preface Sejong explains his motivation for introducing a new writing system:

  The speech sounds of our country’s language are different from those of the Middle Kingdom and are not communicable with the Chinese characters. Therefore, when my beloved simple people want to say something, many of them are unable to express their feelings. Feeling compassion for this I have newly designed twenty-eight letters, only wishing to have everyone easily learn and use them conveniently every day.

  Appended to his brief document was the much longer Hunmin chng’m haerye, “Explanatory Notes and Examples of Usage of the Hunmin chng’m,” written by scholars of the academy, led by Chng In-ji. The Hunmin chng’m haerye explained the philosophical and linguistic principles underlying its design, including the rationale for the letter shapes. (This part of the document was unfortunately lost from about 1500 until 1940.) In a laudatory postface Chng In-ji wrote “an intelligent man can acquaint himself with them [the letters] before the morning is over, and even the simple man can learn them in the space of ten days,” adding, with some justification, that “under our Monarch with his Heaven-endowed wisdom, the codes and measures that have been proclaimed and enacted exceed and excel those of a hundred kings.”

  Sejong could have issued a proclamation enforcing the exclusive use of han’gl, but he did not do so. For someone who had just invented the most rational script in the world he showed prudent restraint in advancing its interests. He sponsored and printed works written in han’gl, used it in official documents, and added knowledge of han’gl to the subjects tested in the civil service exam. But he stopped far short of imposing the new script on the likes of Ch’oe Mal-li, and the upper classes went right on writing in Chinese.

  Sejong died on April 18, 1450. Without him Korea’s golden age soon waned, and han’gl nearly died of neglect. His successor, Munjong, outlived him by only two years, and his grandson, Tanjong, was soon ousted by Munjong’s brother, Sejo. Sejo (1455–68) abolished the Academy of Worthies after usurping the throne, enraged at its members’ loyalty to Tanjong. He went on to publish Buddhist texts in han’gl for the benefit of the people, but han’gl did not enjoy much further support. Among the educated it became known contemptuously as the “vernacular script,” “women’s script,” or even, with undisguised contempt, “morning script,” due to its reputation for being learnable in a morning. Anything that was that easy was clearly not worth wasting ink on.

  Yet precisely because it was easy to learn, han’gl was able to survive this stepchild treatment. Finding refuge among Buddhists, women, and others excluded from power, it put down roots among the people, which enabled it, unlike Korea’s printing industry, to survive the sixteenth century. The Imjin War, as the Japanese invasions of 1592–8 were known, devastated the country, killing hundreds of thousands of people, laying waste the crop lands, and dealing the country a great cultural blow that stripped it of many of Sejong’s accomplishments. Its fine ceramics industry was destroyed, and the kilns and potters captured by the Japanese were used to jump-start the Japanese porcelain industry, earning the war the nickname of the “pottery war.” Korea’s type foundries and printing presses were also destroyed, and books, type, and printers were carried off to Japan. Metal type was not recast in Korea until 1668.

  Independent of the nation’s ruined infrastructure, han’gl survived. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries saw the birth of popular literature written in the vernacular script. It was only in 1894, however, that han’gl came into its own as the nationally sanctioned writing system. That year, as part of a series of reforms aimed at modernizing Korea and distancing it from China, King Kojong gave han’gl official status. Government edicts were to be written in han’gl (with Chinese translation attached if desired) or in a system that mixed Chinese characters and han’gl (analog
ous to the Japanese mixture of kanji and kana). On April 7, 1896, the Independent newspaper took the revolutionary step of publishing only in han’gl and introduced European-style word spacing.

  Meanwhile, the first Protestant missionaries had arrived in Korea, armed with the New Testament in han’gl (translated with the help of Koreans living in Manchuria). The use of the people’s script in the Bible did much to make Christianity appealing to everyday Koreans, while the existence of the Bible, hymnals, and prayer books in turn promoted the use of han’gl.

  Resistance to change was strong, however. In 1895 Yu Kil-jun published “Things Seen and Heard While Traveling in the West” in han’gl, provoking sharp criticism. As a memoir, it was serious literature and should have used a more serious script.

  The Japanese occupation of 1910–45 was unkind to han’gl, but this probably sealed its fate as a source of patriotic pride to the Korean people. Han’gl received its modern name in 1913 from Chu Sigyng, a Korean linguist, patriot, and editor at the Independent, the name being deliberately ambiguous between “Korean script” and “great script.” (In North Korea it is nowadays called Chosn’gl, “Korean script,” or simply uri klcha, “our characters.”) In 1933 the Korean Language Society issued carefully thought-out orthographic principles, codifying the morphophonemic spelling system originally favored by Sejong.

  The Japanese government opposed the use of han’gl and attempted to officially suppress it in 1938. The Korean language was outlawed in schools; all education was in Japanese. By 1945, the illiteracy rate among Koreans was as high as 78 percent.

  The end of World War II brought the end of Japanese domination, and circumstances changed quickly for han’gl. North Korea inaugurated an aggressive literacy campaign which virtually eliminated illiteracy by 1949, though further work was needed to regain this level after the devastation of the Korean War. South Korea, while not as single-minded in its efforts, also made rapid progress. Today Korea as a whole boasts one of the world’s lowest illiteracy rates (proving, in North Korea, that a high literacy rate is no guarantee of economic success). North Korea abolished the use of Chinese characters in official texts in 1949, but up to 3,000 characters are still taught in secondary school and university for the sake of reading older texts. In South Korea, after much waffling, about 1,800 characters continue to be taught, and in a few contexts, such as space-conscious newspaper headlines, they are still used for words of Chinese origin.

  Today Koreans are justly proud of King Sejong and their native script. South Korea observes October 9, the day Sejong promulgated his Hunmin chng’m, as Han’gl Day. Korean linguists point out the inherent logic and systematicity of han’gl and champion its potential as an international phonetic alphabet. With modifications along the lines that Sejong pursued in transcribing Chinese, han’gl could be adapted to other languages in the world and would do the job more systematically than the present International Phonetic Alphabet, based as it is on the arbitrary shapes of the Roman alphabet. While the chance of this happening may be small, linguists around the world nevertheless laud han’gl as the world’s easiest, most rational script. Sejong would be pleased.

  12

  Greek Serendipity

  The Greeks of the ninth century BC were barbarians, a situation for which we should all be grateful. Civilization had retreated from the Aegean region with the fall of the Mycenaean city-states around 1200 BC. When the Greeks again began to enjoy some measure of prosperity and to engage in international trade in the ninth century, they did not rush to adopt the ways of the civilized but authoritarian Near Eastern cultures they encountered. Picking and choosing, they accepted only some ideas from the Near East, the most significant being the concept of writing, which they learned from the Phoenicians around 800 or 775 BC. But being dyed-in-the-wool barbarians, the Greeks did not take up writing to learn wisdom from the Phoenicians, to participate in Phoenician culture, or to acquire the cachet of civilization. Feeling no obligation to Phoenician – or other Near Eastern – culture, the Greeks went on to create something quite new, both of their writing system and of their culture. The unique achievements of classical Greece in art, democracy, philosophy, science, and literature were as yet far in the future, but none of them would have been possible without the Greek free-thinking spirit. The Greek alphabet did not create this independent spirit; rather it was one of its early results.

  To the powerful Phoenicians, home was a collection of city-states that included Byblos, Tyre, and Sidon and occupied a region roughly equivalent to modern Lebanon. From there their trade networks stretched out across the Mediterranean, reaching westward as far as Spain. The Phoenician alphabet, which they had systematized by about 1050 BC, undoubtedly helped them manage their trading empire, and the script partook of the prestige they acquired along with their mercantile wealth.

  Other peoples began to adopt the script. The Hebrews and Aramaeans did, despite the fact that the 22 Phoenician letters were not quite adequate for the consonantal phonemes of their languages. In Asia Minor the Cilicians, speakers of an Indo-European language, began using the Phoenician script around the ninth century. As Phoenician was the prestige language, they wrote in Phoenician, the only Cilician words they wrote being their names. To adequately record their Indo-European language would have required both innovation and independence of thought.

  The Greeks, being barbarians and unmoved by prestige, went about learning to write in their own way. Much ink has been spent on debates as to exactly when, where, and how the Greek voweled alphabet was created from the Phoenician consonantal script. These debates will probably never be fully resolved. For my part, I imagine it happened something like this.

  Sometime in the first years of the eighth century BC, two men were friends, one Greek and the other Phoenician. The Phoenician may have come to trade on one of the Aegean islands or in one of the Greek cities of Ionia (on the coast of Asia Minor, now in Turkey); or the Greek may have lived in Al-Mina, a city on the coast of Syria that knew much Greek trade and may have been a Greek colony (see appendix, figure A.3). Both men were merchants, and they got to know each other through their work. The Phoenician learned to speak Greek, but the Greek, I suspect, did not learn Phoenician.

  One day as the two men were chewing the fat in the Phoenician’s workplace, the subject of writing came up. “It’s a great help in trade,” said the Phoenician. “See, I can tell you without even looking inside that that jar over there contains the finest grade of wine. I can just read the label.”

  “That’s nothing,” said the Greek. “I could have told you the same thing. What else would a person put in such a fine jar?”

  “Point taken,” said the Phoenician. “But how about that crate over there? Would you know, without opening it, that it contains wool?”

  “Oh yes,” replied the Greek. “I’d know by the smell.” “OK, OK. But writing is useful for much more than that. I can tell you what my profits were ten years ago, for example. Any piece of information I don’t want to forget, I just write down.”

  “And how does that help?” asked the Greek. “How do those silly marks actually help you remember things?”

  “Here, I’ll show you,” said the Phoenician, unwittingly making history as he reached for a piece of wood and a knife to scratch letters into it with. “Here’s the first letter. Its name is ’lef,” he said, pronouncing it with the initial glottal stop – the consonant sound for which the letter stood.

  The Greek, not knowing Phoenician, missed the glottal stop entirely. As in English, it made no difference to a Greek word whether it started with a glottal stop or not. It was the [a] which the Greek perceived to be the first sound of the letter’s name. As he copied the scratchings, he struggled to pronounce the strange word. The aspirated Greek [ph] was as close as he could get to [f], but he had trouble ending a word in a plosive consonant. What he finally managed, and what he remembered later, was something like [alpha].

  “Very good,” said the Phoenician, smiling indulgentl
y at this mispronunciation and not realizing that the very first letter of the alphabet had been misunderstood and that a new kind of writing system – one containing vowel letters – had thereby been born. “Now, here’s the next one, bt.”

  That one wasn’t so hard to pronounce, but a little vowel sound did tend to creep in at the end, after the plosive t, yielding bta. The next two letters, gmel and dlet, also went smoothly (see figure 12.1). The fifth letter, h, seemed straightforward enough at first. It started with [h]. But not much later the eighth letter came along, ht. This one started with a voiceless pharyngeal fricative, To a modern speaker of English, this consonant sounds much like someone breathing on eyeglasses preparatory to cleaning them, but to the Greek speaker it probably sounded like a more forceful pronunciation of [h]. He revised his opinion of the fifth letter accordingly. It was the eighth letter that started with [h] – hta, as he pronounced it – and he must have been mistaken about hearing [h] in the fifth letter. That one must be simply a vowel sound. He pronounced it ei (it was not called epsilon, εΨιλóv or “plain e,” until Byzantine times).

  Meanwhile, the sixth letter, ww, was easily understood. It began with [w]. The Greek was not to know that this phoneme would soon fall out of use in his language, leaving the letter obsolete (and later to be renamed digamma because it looked like a gamma, but with two horizontal lines, F).

  The seventh letter, zayin, started with an unfamiliar sound. The sound [z] did not begin words in Greek, but only occurred as a substitute for s before a voiced consonant. However, the Phoenician phoneme was not entirely unlike the Greek affricate [dz]. At some point, perhaps not until he tried writing Greek words on his own, the Greek realized that he could write [dz] with the Phoenician zayin. By then it seems he had forgotten the exact name for it, the names being nonsense to him anyway (though not to the Phoenician, for whom they were meaningful words). In his recollection the letter became dzta, rhyming with bta and hta. Our Greek friend was not to know that the [dz] affricate would by classical times be reversed into a sequence of two phonemes, [zd], and that the dzta would then be used for this reversed [zd] as well as for any sequences of sigma plus delta (s + d, pronounced [zd]) that came along. Nor was he to know that eventually the pronunciation of the letter would be simplified to [z], back to where it started in Phoenician.